Finding Felipe Alfau

In 1985, Steven Moore (1951–), an editor at Dalkey Archive Press, picked up a copy of Locos: A Comedy of Gestures at a used bookstore in Marlboro, Vermont, for ten dollars. The book had been published 49 years earlier, in 1936, by Farrar and Rinehart in New York City. Soon after reading it, Moore looked up its author, Felipe Alfau (1902–99), in the Manhattan phone book. He successfully reached Alfau, who was living alone in Chelsea, and told him he wanted to bring Locos back into print. Alfau agreed. He refused an advance, instructing Dalkey to use whatever profits the book made to publish other forgotten work. While Locos was in production, Moore asked Alfau if he had written anything else, and Alfau sent him a photocopy of a yellowing manuscript that had been buried deep in a dresser drawer since 1948. It was Chromos. Dalkey published the book, which was one of four finalists for the 1990 National Book Award for fiction in the United States.

Although Locos and Chromos, Alfau's only two novels, drew the support of respectable publishers in the United States, he did not consider himself a writer. Between 1923 and 1987, Alfau wrote poetry. Ilan Stavans (1961–) collected, edited, and translated his verses from Spanish to English in the volume Sentimental Songs (La poesía cursi), also published by Dalkey in 1992. But despite more than 50 years of composing verses, Alfau did not identify himself as a poet either. His contributions to cultural production did not stop there. Between the ages of 18 and 25, he occasionally wrote music criticism for the New York-based Spanish-language daily La Prensa, but those articles remain unidentified.

During the rediscovery of Alfau in the United States in the early 1990s, further attempts to recover and introduce his work to a wider audience, particularly a Spanish-speaking one, were made by the prominent writer Carmen Martín Gaite (1925–2000), who produced a Spanish translation of Alfau's first book Old Tales from Spain, a collection of children's stories, published as Cuentos españoles de antaño.